Cristóbal Valenzuela

Cristobal Valenzuela is co-founder and CEO of Runway, the applied research company building generative models and tools for video and creative production. An artist and technologist who came through NYU's ITP program, he treats machine learning as another medium — and Runway as infrastructure for people who make images and films for a living.

ITP, art, and applied research

He trained at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, where barriers between art practice and machine learning felt artificial. With collaborators he spent years on synthetic media before the wider boom, then founded Runway to put neural networks into creative workflows: rotoscoping relief, generative image and video editing, and research models that ship as tools rather than papers alone. On No Priors he described the company as an applied AI research outfit that builds systems so creators can "augment your creativity in any way you want."

From greenscreen to Gen models

Early products like greenscreen cut hours of painful rotoscoping for broadcast and film teams — work nobody loves but everyone has to do. Research papers and models such as Gen-1 and Gen-2 pushed text, image, and video conditioning into production tools used on projects from late-night TV to features. Valenzuela kept research teams close to product so demos did not stay demos.

Running the company like a neural net

On Amplify's Barrchives he said Runway tries to operate like a model: "We tend to run Runway as a neural network, almost as a model itself. You gather data, you have some weights, you use the data to modify the weights." Hiring favors people who can change how they work as new evidence arrives. He also frames research culture as experiment-plus-objective: explore, but hold a long-term goal so the lab does not become chaos.

On creativity for an audience of one

Beyond Hollywood pipelines he has pointed to a quieter use case: "There's a new use case, which is people making things for an audience of one, themselves." Tools that once required a specialized film background become personal creative exercise — closer to going to the gym than chasing awards. The through-line is expanding who gets to make moving images, and what they make them for.